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redherringquotes · 6 years

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The Dublin University Magazine, 1867

Page 304: He tells us that his purpose in collecting these proverbs was “not to teach, but to touch.” In the tenth chapter he devotes some fifty lines to the satirical portrait of a dissimulated and shrewdish housewife: “She maketh earnest matters of every flim-flam.” And he sums up her slippery nature in this line: “She is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.”

Page 310: His “Lenten Stuffe” is a jocular discourse in praise of Yarmouth and the red herring. The ease and harmony of the style, the pungency of the satire, the humor with which burlesque and panegyric are associated in this production, would have made it worth of Swift. He describes Yarmouth in a satirically pompous and bombastic manner: “I care not if, in a dim fair of landscape, I take the pains to describe the supereminent principal metropolis of the red fish … I may not dully overpass the gallant beauty of their heavy, which, having but as it were a belt of land, or, as Camden calls it, cingulum terrace — a little tongue of the earth, betwixt it and the wide main, sticks not to manage arms, and holds its own indefeasibly against that universal unbounded empire of surges, and so hath done for this hundred years … But how Yarmouth, of itself so innumerably populous and replenished, and in so barren a spot seated, should not only supply her inhabitants with plentiful purveyance of sustenance, but provide and victual moreover this monstrous army of strangers, was a matter that egregiously puzzled and entranced my apprehension. Hollanders, Zealanders, Scots, French, western men, northern men, besides all the hundreds and wapentakes, nine miles distance, fetch the best of their viands and manger from her market. For ten weeks together, this rabble rout of outlandishers are billeted with her, yet in all that while the rate of no kind of food is raised, nor the plenty of their markets one pint of butter rebated … Here I could break out into a boundless race of oratory, in shrill trumpeting and con-celebrating the royal magnificence of the government, that for state and civil ordering scarcely admitteth any rivals.” After several pages devoted to Yarmouth, he thus “enters the triumphal chariot of the red herring;” “Homer of rats and frogs hath heroicked it; other oaten pipers after him in praise of the gnat, the flea, the hasle-nut, the grasshopper, the butterfly, the parrot, the popinjay, philip sparrow, and cuckoo.” … And thus he laughs at erudition, philosophy, physic, “Italian and German cornugraphers,” and other “waste authors,” as “so many heads, so many whirligigs; and if all these have terlery-gincked it so frivolously of they know not what, I may cum gratis et privilege pronounce it, that a red herring is wholesome in a frosty morning, and wake up and rake up some few scattered syllables together, in the polishing; excursions and circumquaques, but totaliter appositum.” And he concludes his digressions and satirical extravaganzas with this peroration: “The puissant red herring, the gold Hesperides red herring, the Maeonian red herring, the red herring of Red Herrings Hall, every pregnant peculiar of whose resplendent laud and honor, to delineate and adumbrate to the ample life, were a work that would dry fourscore and eighteen Castalian fountains of eloquence, consume another Athens of fecundity, and abate the haughtiest poetical fury betwixt this and the burning zone and the tropic of Cancer. … St. Denis for France, St. James for Spain, St. Patrick for Ireland, St. George for England, and the red herring for Yarmouth.” Page 371: The young girls of Durham and Yorkshire thus pay honor to St. Agnes, when they want to get a glimpse of their future partnersÚ — Two friends spend the day without eating, drinking, or speaking, bake a cake towards evening, still in solemn silence, divide it, each carrying her portion of it upstairs, walking backwards, eat it on getting into the sleeping apartment, and then jump into bed. If all the conditions are rightly observed, and either lass does not see her future husband in a vision of the night, she considers herself next morning an ill-used aspirant. Other zealous candidates for the marriage ring spend the day as mentioned, take an egg, extract the yolk, fill the cavity with salt, and then swallow shell, salt, white, and all. Instead of this delicacy they occasionally use a raw red herring, which is found equally efficacious in promoting visions.

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redherringquotes · 6 years

Text

John Malham, The Harleian Miscellany, 1809

Page 290: Give me good words, I beseech thee, though thou gives me nothing else, and thy words shall stand for thy deeds, which I will take as well in worth, as if they were the deeds and evidences of all the land thou hast. Here I bring you a red herring, if you will find drink to it, there’s an end, no other detriments will I put you to. Let the kan of strong ale your constable, with the toast his brown bill, and sugar and nutmegs his watchmen, stand in a readiness to entertain me every time I come by your lodging. In Russia there are no present but of meat or drink; I present you with meat, and you, in honorable courtesy to requite me, can do no less than present me with the best morning’s draught of merry-go-down in your quarters; and so I kiss the shadow of your feets shadow, amiable dons, expecting your sacred poems of the Hermit’s tale, that will restore the golden age amongst us, and so, upon my soul’s knees, I take my leave. Yours, for a whole Last of Red Herring. Th. Nashe. …… To his Readers, he cares not what they be. Nashe’s Lenten Stuff! And why Nashe’s Lenten Stuff? Some scabbed called Esquire replies: Because I had money let me at Yarmouth; and I pay them again in praise of their own town and the red-herring. And, if it were so, Goodman Pig-Wigged, were not that honest dealing? Pay thou all thy debts so, if thou canst for thy life. But thou art a ninny-hammer, that is not it; therefore, Nickenoky, I call it Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, as well for that it was most of my study the last lent as that we use so to term any fish that takes salt, of which the red-herring is one of the aptest. O! but, saith another John Dringle, there is a book of the Red-Herring’s Tail, printed four terms since, that made this stale. Let it be a tail of gaberdine, if it will, I am nothing entailed thereunto; I scorn it, I scorn it, that my works should turn tail to any man. Head, body, tail, and all of a red-herring you shall have of me, if that will please you; or, if that will not please you, stay till Easter term, and then, with the answer to the Trim Tram, I will make you laugh your hearts out. Take me at my word, for I am the man that will do it. This is a light frisking of my wit, like the praise of injustice, the fever quartan, Busiris, or Phalaris, wherein I follow the trace of the famousest scholars of all ages, whom a wantonising humor once in their lifetime hath possessed to play with straws, and turn molehills into mountains. Page 306: The application of this whole catalogue of waste authors is no more but this, Quot capita tot setentiae, so many heads, so many whirligigs; and, if all these have terlery-gincked it so frivolously, of, they know not what, I may, cum gratis & privilege, pronounce it, that a red-herring is wholesome in a frosty morning, and rake up some few scattered syllables together, in the polishing; excursions and circumquaques, but totaliter appositum. That English merchandise is most precious, which no country can be without; if you ask Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, or Lemster, or Cotswold, what merchandise that should be, they will answer you, it is the very same, which Polydore Virgil calls, vere aureum vellus, the true golden fleece of our wool and English cloth, and nought else: other ingraining upland cormorants will grunt out, it is grana paradisi, our grain or corn that is most sought after. The Westerners and Northerners, that it is lead, tin, and iron. Butter and cheese, butter and cheese, saith the farmer; but from every one of these I dissent, and will stoutly abide by it, that, to troll in cash throughout all nations of Christendom, there is no fellow to the red herring. The French, Spanish, and Italian, have wool enough of their own, whereof they make cloth to serve their turn, though it be somewhat courser than ours. For corn, none of the east parts but what surpasseth us; of lead and tin is the most scarcity in foreign dominions, and plenty with us, though they are not utterly barren of them. As for iron, about Isenborough, and other places of Germany, they have quadruple the store that we have. As touching butter and cheese, the Hollanders cry, by your leave we must go before you; and the Transalpiners, with their lordly Parmesan (so named of the city of Parma, in Italy, where it is first clout-crushed and made) shoulder in for the upper-hand as hotly; when as, of our appropriate glory of the red-herring, no region, betwixt the poles aortic and antartick, may , can, or will rebate from us one scruple. Page 326: As good a toy to mock an ape was it of him, that showed a country fellow the Red Sea, where all the red herrings were made (as some places in the sea, where the sun is most transpiercing, and beats with his rays fervenjest, will look as red as blood) and the jest of a scholar in Cambridge, that standing angling on the town bridge there, as the country people on the market day passed by, secretly baited his hook with a red herring, with a bell about the neck; and so conveying it into the water that no man perceived it, all on the sudden, when he had a competent throng gathered about him, up he twitched it again, and laid it openly before them; whereat the gaping rural fools, driven into no less admiration than the common people about London, some few years since, were at the babbling of Moor-ditch, swore by their Christendoms, that, as many days and years as they had lived, they never saw such a miracle of red-herring taken in fresh water before. That greedy sea-gull ignorance, is apt to devour anything: For a new Messias they are ready to expect of the Bedlam haymaker’s wife by London Bridge; he that proclaims himself Elias, and saith he is inspired with mutton and porridge; And, with them, it is current, that Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, slain twenty years since with Stukeley at the battle of Alcazar, is raised from the dead, like Lazarus, and alive to be seen at Venice. Page 330: My readers, peradventure, may see more into it than I can; for, in comparison of them, in whatsoever I set forth, I am (Bernardus non vidit omnia) as blind as blind Bayard, and have the eyes of a beetle; nothing from them is obscure, they being quicker sighted than the sun, to espy in his beams the motes that are not, and able to transform the lightest murmuring gnat to an elephant. Carp, or descant they, as their spleen moves them, my spleen moves me not to defile my hands with them, but to fall a crash more to the red-herring. Page 331: How many are there in the world, that childishly deprave alchemy, and cannot spell the first letter of it! In the black book of which ignorant band of scorners, it may be, I am scored up with the highest: If I am, I must intreat them to wipe me out, for the red-herring hath lately been my ghostly father to convert me to their faith; the probatum est of whose transfiguration ex luna in solem, from his dusky tin hue into a perfect golden blandishment, only by the foggy smoke of the grossest kind of fire that is, illumines my speculative soul, what much more, not sophisticate, or superficial effects, but absolute, essential alterations of metals there may be made by an artificial, repurified flame, and divers other helps of nature added besides. Page 332: The rebel Jack Cade was the first, that devised to put red herrings in cases, and from him they have their name. Now, as we call it, the swinging of herrings, when he caded them; so in a halter was he swung, and trussed up as hard and round as any cade of herrings he trusted up in his time, and perhaps of his being so swung and trussed up, having first found out the trick to cade herring, they would so much honor him in his death, as not only to call it swinging, but cading of herring also. If the text will bear this, we will force it to bear more, but it shall be but the weight of a straw, or the weight of Jack Straw more, who with the same Groeca fide, I married not you in the former, was the first that put the red herring in straw, over head and ears like beggars, and the fishermen upon that Jack-strawed him ever after; and some, for he was so beggarly a knave that challenged to be a gentleman, and had no wit nor wealth but what he got by the warm wrapping up herring, raised this proverb of him, ‘Gentleman Jack Herring that puts his breeches on his head, for want of wearing.’ Other disgraceful proverbs of the herring there are, as, ‘Never a barrel better herring; Neither flesh nor fish, nor good red herring,’ which those, that have bitten with ill bargains of either sort, have dribbed forth in revenge, and yet not have them from Yarmouth; many coast towns, besides it, enterprising to cure, salt, and pickle up herrings, but mar them; because they want the right feat, how to salt and season them. Page 332: So I could pluck a crow with poet Martial, for calling it putre halec, the scauld rotten herring; but he meant that of the fat reasty Scottish herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one month (bestow what cost on them you will) wax rams, if they be kept; whereas our imbarrelled white herrings, flourishing with the stately brand of Yarmouth upon them, scilicet, the three half lions, and the three half fishes, with the crown over their head, last in long voyages, better than the red herring, and not only are famous at Roan, Paris, Dieppe, and Caen (whereof the first, which is Roan, serviette all the high countries of France with it, and Dieppe, which is the last save one, victuals all Picardy with it) but here at home is made account of like a marquis, and received at court right solemnly; I care not much if I rehearse to you the manner, and that is thus: Page 333: No more can I do for you than I have done, were you my God-children every one: God make you his children, and keep you from the Dunkirkers, and then, I doubt not but, when you are driven into harbor by foul weather, the cans shall walk to the health of Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, and the praise of the red herring; and even those, that attend upon the pitch kettle, will be drunk to my good fortunes and recommendums. One boon you must not refuse me in (if you be boni socii and sweet Olivers) that you let not your rusty swords sleep in their scabbards, but lash them out in my quarrel as hotly, as if you were to cut cables, or hew the main-mast overboard, when you hear me mangled and torn in men’s mouths about this playing with a shuttlecock, or tossing empty bladders in the air. Page 334: Alas! poor hunger-starved muse, we shall have some spawn of a goose-quill, or over worn pander, quirking and girding. Was it so hard driven that it had nothing to feed upon but a red herring? Another drudge of the pudding house (all whose lawful means to live by throughout the whole year will scarce purchase him a red herring) says I might as well have writ of a dog’s turd, in his teeth sir-reverence. But, let none of these scum of the suburbs be too vinegar tart with me; for, if they be, I’ll take mine oath upon a red herring and eat it, to prove that their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers, or any other of their kin, were scullions dishwasher, and dirty draft and swill set against a red herring. The puissant red herring, the golden Hesperides red herring, the Maeonian red herring, the red herring of Red Herrings Hall, every pregnant peculiar of whose resplendent laud and honor, to delineate and adumbrate to the ample life, were a work that would drink dry four-score and eighteen Castilian fountains of eloquence, consume another Athens of fecundity, and abate the haughtiest poetical fury betwixt this and the burning zone and the tropic of Cancer. My conceit is cast into a sweating sickness, with ascending those few steps of his renown; into what a hot broiling Saint Laurence’s feel would it relapse then, should I spend the whole bag of my wind in climbing up to the lofty mountain crest of his trophies? But no more wind will I spend on it but this: Saint Denis for France, Saint James for Spain, Saint Patrick for Ireland, Saint George for England, and the red herring for Yarmouth.

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